Chapter 11. Storage Virtualization

Storage virtualization has been alternately praised as a panacea for all sorts of storage networking ills and denounced as a marketing fraud perpetrated by avaricious vendors on desperate and gullible customers. Although vendor greed may in fact result in marketing excesses, the potential for storage virtualization to dramatically reduce administrative costs is so great that wild enthusiasm for the technology has been difficult to restrain. If only people agreed on what it actually does. This chapter presents an overview of storage virtualization and the sometimes conflicting proposals for how it should be implemented. As the technology matures, storage virtualization will facilitate the deployment of shared storage and will significantly reduce the cost of storage administration.